Demand Generation Strategies

Demand Generation Strategies: Biggest Shifts Happening in Marketing Strategy

If we learned anything from 2020, it’s that anything can happen in the world at any time. As a marketer, being flexible and adapting to the ever-changing world as we know it will be your greatest strength. What worked in terms of marketing strategy before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic is old news. Even further, what may have been relevant three or even six months ago might no longer be a strategy that works today, right here and now.

Our world is shifting fast. As we move into 2021, we want to be mindful of the biggest shifts in marketing, to monitor how we’re adapting and maintaining relevancy as we fight to compete in our respective markets.

Although proactive planning is important, an ever-changing environment can’t support a 12-month plan. At SmartBug®, our teams focus on strategic plans that are flexible and reach no more than three months into the future for that specific reason.

The Secret Marketing Sauce

You’re probably wondering, “What do I need to know to get started on the right foot this year?” I’ll let you in on a little secret … there’s no secret sauce in the world of marketing. There are, however, trends we’re seeing in the industry that we recommend your team adapt to right now.

As marketers, we spend lots of time educating ourselves, adapting, analyzing (often overthinking), and predicting behavior to hopefully drum up buzz for our brands. We don’t always come out on top—failure is inevitable. But maintaining relevancy in the market means staying on top of strategies that have been tried and tested.

One thing we do know is that, as marketers, generating that “buzz” starts with demand generation. Here are a few demand generation strategies for 2021 that your team needs to be sure they’re paying attention to.

Demand Generation Strategies for 2021 You Need Right Now

You might first be thinking, well, what is “demand generation” marketing? Demand generation marketing is when a company excites customers about its product or service. It generates a “buzz” through the use of various programs and strategies to raise awareness, with the goal of generating new relationships with potential customers.

Demand generation doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long-term strategy. Inbound marketing is just one of the methodologies that fit into this model. Although inbound marketing is an essential part of demand generation and something you should already be doing for your business—it’s in some ways “old news.”

This blog is dedicated to newcomers in the realm of marketing and focused on how your team needs to catch up! Here are just a few ideas to turn your attention to in the near future.

Account-based marketing is the new B2B.

As a marketer, you’ve probably heard the term account-based marketing (ABM) for some time now, but like many marketers, are simply focused on the idea of full steam ahead, and haven’t stopped to smell the ABM flowers.

I recently began reading Terminus’s ABM is B2B, a book dedicated to explaining how the trend of account-based marketing is, in fact, business to business (B2B). This trend is a fundamental shift in how we’re generating leads and buzz for our brand through account-based marketing efforts. By tossing out the old funnel and focusing on this new tried-and-true strategy, you’ll be able to grow your business through driving qualified leads through a means of specific marketing strategies focused on 1:1 tactics that avoid that one-size-fits-all approach.

Terminus, one of the many partners SmartBug works with, is an end-to-end, account-based marketing technology platform that allows B2B marketers and sales professionals to amplify their ABM marketing. As leaders in the ABM industry, they use this book to highlight the ways the marketing funnel as we once knew it is gone. Instead, the new focus of your marketing efforts should be the ABM funnel.

SourceLink:https://www.business2community.com/strategy/demand-generation-strategies-biggest-shifts-happening-in-marketing-strategy-02384903

Email Campaigns With Zoho

Automate and Monitor Your Email Campaigns With Zoho

ZOHO started its current Email Marketing Basics Webinar series with how to write effective copy and building and maintaining your list. The next webinar is titled Automating and Monitoring Your Campaigns, which are key skill sets to optimize your email marketing efforts.

As you increase your email list, automating your workflow is key to managing the hundreds or thousands of emails you will acquire. ZOHO is going to teach you how to create automated email marketing campaigns to streamline your customer acquisition process. You’ll also learn about managing your sender reputation score, as well as key email marketing metrics to track to make sure your emails are performing as well as they can.

Transitioning your team to remote work requires the right tools and the right mindset. Zoho provides you with the resources and thought leadership you need to successfully run your company remotely.

Zoho offers more than 40 integrated applications for you to manage, automate and connect various business processes across your organization. Zoho One is a powerful suite of software to run your entire small business.

Source link: https://smallbiztrends.com/2021/02/small-business-events-calendar-february-6-2021.html

Digital Services for Lead Generation

 

Digital Services for Lead Generation | Lead Generation Platforms: Ken Research

There are several channels and marketing tools for digital marketers to utilize to get customers to notice their brand. If your business functions appropriately when in direct communication with the customers over the phone, lead generation marketing can provide a number of benefits.

Lead generation marketing is about motivating the interest of customers in a product or service and capturing that interest by obtaining those customers to reach out directly to your organization. Lead generation takes on several forms and can be deployed across several channels to successfully draw customers into your business.

In addition to lead generation, Ken Research as a service provider of digital services for lead generation designates database solutions, event marketing services, and account-based marketing. We resist the heavy-lifting off your plate for B2B lead generation. Furthermore, our lead generation platforms countenances you to be more functional in who you are steering and who is successful in your message. You can target your preferred customers with the sustenance of profuse channels and by distinct geographies. Not only has this, with our lead generation platform, but your users are also proper to relate and research abundant products and services, thus incubation their aptitude to undertake the unsurpassed deal and functioning quality.

Our Lead generation platform is an inveterate and money-making tactic for attracting impending consumers and nurturing the leads throughout the technique to transform them into paying users. In the digital marketing world, the feasible customers who are fretful in buying your products or services are conferred to as “leads”. Hence, it is imperious to leverage numerous strategies in a business website to nervousness these qualified leads thereby succeeding in heightened ROI.

Source link:https: //www.openpr.com/news/2234197/digital-services-for-lead-generation-lead-generation

Email Marketing

Email Marketing versus Marketing Automation: Understanding the Difference

Ray Tomlinson was the first human ever to email. It’s been 42 years since and a lot has changed for email, especially for email marketing. From just having the ability to send a message, it has evolved to be the most cost-effective way of direct marketing. At present around 81% of SMEs rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, while 80% use it for retention. And in the digital era, the influx of data through social media and mobile devices paved the way for data collection and data management. Such importance on data led to the rise in automated and behavioral-led programs where strategies focused on customers’ specific needs. All of this development contributed to what we call Marketing Automation.

Do More in Marketing with Automation

So, if marketing automation is here to automate marketing tasks, do businesses still need email marketing? This is where the line between the two gets blurred. And businesses must understand which entity benefits how, when to switch, and whether even switching makes sense. While both these methods are used to target an audience group, email marketing only deals with tracking actions taken by the recipients. Before further diving into differences, let’s understand what email marketing and marketing automation are.

Email Marketing

Neil Patel describes email marketing as “Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy based on sending emails and developing relationships with prospects and customers. An effective email marketing strategy converts prospects into customers and turns first-time buyers into recurring customers. One advantage of email marketing is that you can automate the entire process.”

Email marketing is loved by most marketers as it has emerged as a proven way of building trust with prospects, enhance relationships with existing customers, and build loyalty. It is also a vital tool for educating prospects on the value of the brand and keeping them engaged between purchases.

Marketing Automation

According to HubSpot, “Marketing automation is all about using software to automate marketing activities. Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns — not just for the sake of efficiency, but so they can provide a more personalized experience for their customers. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier.”

The right mixture of automated technology and strategy can define marketing automation in simple words. It helps in offering personalized content to prospects and converts them into delighted customers.

So What’s The Difference?

Behavioral Tracking

The fundamental difference between the two is the way data is collected. Email marketing tracks prospect’s behavior over the opening of an email, whether they clicked any link or how many times they did. You can see the click rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates. After collecting the data, the decision is concluded in terms of percentage based on prospects’ interaction with the email.

On the other hand, marketing automation helps marketers to track prospects over the web. How they interact with the website, which categories/landing pages/links they opened. Did they request or downloaded reports/ebooks/infographics/whitepapers or confirmed their presence for a webinar? It also covers behavior outside of your websites, such as social media and other digital footprints. Marketing automation helps in crafting personalized campaigns/messaging based on the aforementioned detailed information.

Customer-centric Campaigning

Email marketing requires a significant investment to create an email, list segmentation, and post-delivery analytics. However, after creating a campaign, the basic strategy is to send out a single, fixed email to everybody. We also know the technique as ‘batch and blast’ as the emails are sent to everyone on the list. Additionally, automating your email marketing can let you send emails to different list segments and even send different emails to different prospects.

However, marketing automation rewards you more for your efforts. The process still entails creating an email, list segmentation, etc. but also lets you do more with automation with more choices and options. You can set up a series of emails/messages to go out over time and can even set them up as prospects interact with your website. This communication strategy of sending a pre-written set of messages to prospects over time is also known as drip marketing.

Source link: https://martechseries.com/content/email-mktg/email-marketing-vs-marketing-automation/

B2B Marketers

Paid Search Basics for B2B Marketers

When it’s developed, monitored and managed properly, paid search can be a critical component of the success of any integrated marketing campaign. There are multiple variables to consider from the beginning and throughout the campaign that can impact budget, visibility and the end result. It’s important to frequently assess your analytics to make sure the campaign is on track and make ongoing changes to improve performance. To get you started on beginning a paid search campaign, we cover some of the basics.

Goals

From the beginning you should define what you are trying to achieve when obtaining clicks to your website or certain landing page. There are a variety of goals that you can set. Here are some to consider:

• Build brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Drive engagement to an asset or product
• Draw donations for a fundraiser

A clearly stated and measurable objective is important to being able to properly analyze the results on a frequent basis and revise your paid search campaign as needed.

Keywords

Pay-per-click (PPC) is popular because you’re paying for the clicks that drive traffic directly to your website. To execute this effectively, it’s important to first choose the right keywords. The right keywords are specific, relevant and commonly searched. The wrong keywords can generate clicks but deter viewers on your website from completing the desired call to action (CTA) that will ultimately help you achieve your stated campaign objectives. When determining the best possible keywords for your campaigns consider these types of keywords that makeup what and how users search:

• Branded Keywords: Words that contain the brand name or company name.
• Short-Tail Keywords: General searches that consist of only a few words, usually one or two, such as “B2B marketing” or “technology.”
• Long-Tail Keywords: General searches that consist of more than three to four words and tend to be more focused such as “B2B marketing plan templates” or “technology for a marketing company.” These keywords also have higher conversion rates because the more specific a user gets, the more purchase intent they have.

Review historical metrics and search engine optimization (SEO) reports to discover popular words that have driven traffic to your website. Always keep your goals and strategy in mind when choosing the keywords.

Budgeting

Paid search campaign spending varies depending on the budget that your B2B organization has. To ensure that the budget is not exceeded, paid search campaigns should be monitored daily. Allotting a weekly budget is popular in most cases, in others, you might see a monthly or full campaign budget. Whichever budgeting technique you choose to pursue or have been given, keep these things in mind:

• Forecast: Forecasting spend, lead generation and more, if available, is useful for budgeting. If you intend on spending an amount of your budget per day but the forecast for leads isn’t as high as you would have hoped, this can allow you to adjust accordingly.
• Use data to optimize: Digging deep into the data you receive from your paid search campaigns is key to future spending. Doing so will be beneficial for budgeting as you can then know where to direct your budget in the future.
• Be flexible: Things might not always go to plan in terms of your campaigns. Using forecasting and associated tools are very beneficial for planning and benchmarking. Sometimes, the actual results will not match the projected results, whether it be below or above the projections. If this is the case, understand where the differences were and what impact that it had on your campaign.

Analysis

It’s essential to run an analysis on the campaigns your organization runs. There are a variety of metrics and statistics that you can look through but focus on the data that showed spikes, dips, and/or steady numbers. Evaluate what changed for any fluctuations. Did you add keywords? Change your campaign copy? Change your landing page URL? In looking at the numbers, what were the impressions? What was the CTR? And, most importantly, what were the conversion rates? Did you hit the initial goals you set to get viewers to buy, engage, gain knowledge or donate? Your initial goals need to be measured from the beginning to end to understand the full success of your campaigns.

Source link: https://www.business2community.com/b2b-marketing/paid-search-basics-for-b2b-marketers-02382694

 

 

Impact of Covid 19 on B2B Lead Generation Services and How to Deal with it?

Traditional and in-person activities reaching a standstill owing to the pandemic have acted as a severe blow

to the prospects of accelerated delivery of lead generation services. The unprecedented situations set forth by the pandemic have induced business sectors across the globe to bring radical changes in their modes of operation to align their business with the new normals. Here’s a look at the impacts that the ongoing pandemic had on lead generation services and the ways that deal with it.

Strategic client acquisition and retention– 

Businesses will lose clients and it is one of the inadvertent impacts of the pandemic. A severe crunch in the capital halted supply and demand pipeline has brought closures in operations which resulted in client losses for many enterprises last year. While this will continue to hurt the business segments in 2021, it will be prudent for enterprises to place their trust in outsourced B2B lead generation services to fill their pipeline with better leads. Visionary lead generation services providers are retargeting customer groups whose business interests and the new mode of operation are perfectly aligned with clients’ portfolio of services and products. They are conducting research in real-time to create an extensive list of customers who they know can be directly benefitted by clients’ services. Such an extensive list of a mixed blend of customers increases the prospects of client retention to offset the pandemic-induced losses.

Proactive and meaningful client conversation- 

A majority of business sectors have started lifting shutters off their operation and this means that they will resort to every means to get on an aggressive path to compensate for their losses. They will relook at establishing their ties with partners to ramp up their business. This is an opportunity for B2B lead generation service providers who must keep a keen eye on such businesses and start reaching out to them on a proactive basis to lay the business proposition of their clients. Prior to doing that, clients must communicate clearly to the service providers about what they can offer that can benefit enterprises in the current business difficulties and if they have anything new to offer that can appeal to enterprises in the current situation. Lead generation services providers should proactively reach out to as many such enterprises to convey propositions that can directly appeal to their business sentiments.   

Optimized workforce– Mobility restrictions and a gradual shift to remote working infrastructure will induce lead generation services providers to downsize and optimize their workforce. Taking a leap from the usual practice of two or more salespeople to dedicate about 20% of their time in customer prospecting, it is prudent of a service provider to keep a single employee who will have the complete responsibility of customer prospecting in association with a lead generation expert. It is the consideration of the fact that making connections with multiple customers within a shorter time is of prime importance at the moment.

Investing more in digital content– In keeping with the work from the home operational structure, B2B lead generation services providers must widen their digital frontiers since most of the client conversations will be online. Rich digital contents in the form of virtual events and podcasts are some of the effective ways to reach out to enterprises to invoke their interest and turn them into quality B2B leads.

Enterprises that did not give in to panic and instead, identified this difficult time to revise and rehaul their operations have successfully made their mark among customer bases with improved lead generation services that are critically relevant to the current times.

Source Link: https://techstory.in/impact-of-covid-19-on-b2b-lead-generation-services-and-how-to-deal-with-it/

Which Email Marketing tool is better?

Recently email marketing is a growing channel in digital marketing using email marketing leads are generated and sell product and service today's blog I discuss which email marketing is better.

1) Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a leading email marketing tool in the email marketing channels so its tools give 2000 Subscribers for 12000 emails/month it is free to plan for MailChimp.

Email deliverability is good, email newsletter creator UI is good and easy to understand I recommended to all email marketers use this tool.

Visit Tool - https://mailchimp.com/

 

2) Elastic email

Elastic Email is one growing email marketing tool. It gives 100 emails per day free plan and it gives SMTP API Facility, Email Template builder UI is simple and user-friendly. Overall performance is good.

Visit Tool - https://elasticemail.com/

 

3) Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns is the best email marketing tool use in the industry. It gives 2000 Subscribers for 12000 emails/month it is free to plan for Zoho Campaigns.

I like this tool user friendly and easy to handle.  

Visit Tool - https://www.zoho.com/campaigns/